Psychedelic Collapse

Under the pen name Matthew Azouley, I am pleased to announce that I have successfully edited my first book, Climate Collapse? -Calls to Action from Around the World.

I wrote this promo text for the ebook purchase page:

In ‘Climate Collapse? Calls to Action from Around the World’, diverse global authors have come together to share their perspectives and solutions regarding the climate crisis and the deeper ecological crisis of modern civilisation, which some argue is leading to global societal collapse. Building on the success of their previous anthology Climate Adaptation, Arkbound is platforming an eclectic mix of writing styles and levels for this new collection, from a famous climate scientist, scholars and activists like Dr Bill McGuire, Brian Tokar and Dr Gail Bradbrook, to unknown and first-time authors from the Global South, who bring their vital lived experiences to bear on what is bound to be a challenging future ahead for all of us. Forget the climate COPs!

There were some glitches with getting the ebook ready on time for the anti-COP promotion that was planned. Nevertheless, I intend to promote this book consistently over the months to make it into a slow burning bestseller. If you would like to collaborate on this, or co-promote something aligned that you have worked on or are working on, feel free to get in touch.

Many aspects of the ongoing Collapse of contemporary civilization can be seen to be psychedelic, in that they do not conform to our perceptual expectations of daily life, and in that they are a revealing of deeper levels of reality than are usually in our consciousness. In this context, I wonder what ingesting psychoactive substances might do to deepen acceptance and understanding of Collapse.

Recently, my wife and I have experimented with psilocybin in the form of so-called magic mushrooms. The last time we took some, we ingested just over one gram each, the highest dose we have yet tried. We were strongly driven by the desire to end my wife’s depression and other psychological dis-ease, which she has been suffering from for several months (actually, years). Conventional anti-depressants / medication are having a limited (although important) effect, and in any case she wants to be free from these, eventually. In times of Collapse, it is also unwise to prolong reliance on any form of medication longer than necessary, considering the instability of global and regional supply chains.

After experiences with lower doses which had affected me but not my wife, we were worried that the effects of psilocybin might be blocked by her medication (venlafaxine, lamotrigine and aripiprazole) but as it turned out, on this highest dose, we both experienced feelings of elation and clarity, there was a lot of laughing (this is the first time in several weeks I had heard my wife laugh for longer than a second), and she was able to reflect with self-deprecating humour on her thought patterns that only hours before had had her deep in depression.

On a protracted and mass scale, what insights into the ‘depression’ of collapsing modern civilization might us humans collectively gain, were the use of pyschedelics to become normalised? Might organic substance-induced psychedelic experiences help us align more usefully with the distortions of Collapse?

Category: Psychedelic Collapse

Slow burning bestseller: introducing Climate Collapse? -Calls to Action from Around the World